[baudehlo]

> As an async environment it doesn't offer anything either new or too compelling

That isn't strictly true.

If you focus on the traditional scripting languages as your competition: Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl: Then you start to realise that Node.js does offer a similar language structure (dynamic, no compilation, etc), with the benefits of thousands of concurrent connections (which those languages will do with certain modules) but while forcing all the libraries to also be async (which those languages DO NOT do).

At my last job I had to build an SMTP server capable of scaling to 50k concurrent connections. Building this in Perl was fine, except for any library I wanted to use - all of the libraries were synchronous. So now I wrote Haraka, which Craigslist are now using as their incoming SMTP server.

If you compare all that to Java you get slightly less performance but probably lower memory requirements. And that's OK. Different strokes for different folks.